


Spellcraft and Other Things

by holdinginpee



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: (justified by magic), Bladder Control, Bladder Inflation, Gen, Omorashi, diversions on magical theory, how much worldbuilding is too much?, maybe excessively so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-12
Updated: 2015-04-12
Packaged: 2018-03-22 12:03:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3728239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/holdinginpee/pseuds/holdinginpee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A rediscovered spell leaves Hermione desperate to find a way to reverse its effects.</p><p>Well, she always did learn well under pressure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spellcraft and Other Things

It began with a whim, really. A choice made in anger, that in a calmer moment might well have been passed over entirely.

Or perhaps it began with a book. Pansy had never been a fan of reading - she was firmly of the opinion that she oughtn’t _need_ to know subjects inside-out, because what proper Pureblood couldn’t just delegate any tasks that required specialty skills to a servant? But her mother disagreed, calling her view short-sighted and foolish and “an invitation to disaster”, and her mother’s word was law or higher than law in her house. So there she had been, in the Parkinson family library, reading through her assigned book of the day, an old and surprisingly ratty copy of a spellmaker’s text; its condition was made up for by the notes written by the author himself, made in that brief period after he apprenticed to a master spellmaker who recognized his gift but before he had sufficient skill to craft all his spells without writing anything down, which included various insights into the spellcrafting process and even a few minor spells that had never made it to the public.

And as luck would have it, Pansy had stumbled upon a secret in the book that her mother had never noticed: two pages were almost seamlessly stuck together, so that one might never suspect they had been separate. Looking around to make sure she wasn’t being watched - she wouldn’t get in much trouble if she was caught, but she _did_ still have to keep up appearances - she pulled out her wand and cast a minor but tricky spell (carefully ignoring that she would never have known how to do it had her mother not insisted she read a book much like this one) to peel the pages apart without obscuring the writing on either.

Most of the newly-revealed text was fairly mundane, but there, in the middle of the right-hand page, was the prize: a tiny, cramped annotation, detailing a wand movement and incantation, and the enigmatic words “A spell to torment thy rivals, or those deserving of contempt.” Carefully, she memorized the spell, not giving any particular thought to whether she might actually use it; after all, it was better to have one too many ways to remind those beneath one’s station of their place than one too few.

Which brought her back to the Hogwarts third year, red-faced with anger, almost screaming at that _bint_ Granger, who seemed to think herself better than Pansy - laughable! And when Granger turned to leave, _dismissing her_ , Pansy saw red; she whipped out her wand and cast.

* * *

“ _Immobulus!_ ”

Hermione cursed the utter thoughtlessness she’d shown in turning her back on a Slytherin, and tried to at once spin around, draw her wand, and jump aside. She was a long way off from the grace of a practiced duellist, though, and though she managed to pull away from being struck centre mass by the bolt of force it still caught her arm, and that was enough; the spell took, and her muscles seized, pinning her in place. Her abortive dodge interrupted, she fell to the ground.

Pansy’s movements seemed even less practiced for whatever spell she was casting than for most, and had Hermione been able to move she would have had no hope of striking her with it. That, she thought, was probably exactly why the girl had opened with a freezing charm, to ensure she couldn’t dodge whatever the spell would be when it finally came out.

“ _Adtineo tetendi cumulatus,_ ” the Slytherin incanted with uncharacteristic care, accompanying it with a complex if somewhat clumsy wand movement. The air in front of her wand seemed to ripple like liquid, an unusual and curious spellsign that Hermione would have wondered at had she not been preoccupied with worrying about what it might do to her; but when it struck her worries seemed for naught, as the only obvious effect was a sensation akin to being dunked head to toe in warm water.

And then after a moment the freezing charm placed upon her broke - it had been sloppily cast to begin with, and the disruption of another spell taking hold of her was enough to shatter its effects. Pansy’s expression of malicious curiosity turned plain malicious as Hermione leapt up, and she raised her wand to cast again, but Hermione was faster; with a perfectly-executed “ _immobulus cita_ ” she ensured Pansy would be unable to chase after her, yet wouldn’t be trapped for long enough for a teacher to find her. Hopefully Pansy’s pride, combined with the fact that complaining to, for instance, Professor Snape would mean admitting how poorly she had performed in the impromptu duel, would save Hermione from any Professorial wrath; the only backlash would be from the girl herself, and Hermione _already_ had to deal with that.

Hermione fled, just slowly enough to avoid running in the halls, back to the Gryffindor dorm, where no Slytherins could try and hex her, and spared only a moment’s thought for the unknown spell that so entirely failed to produce any effect.

* * *

Her first clue that she hadn’t gotten off quite so easily as all that came later that night, when she went to use the bathroom before bed.

More specifically, it came when she sat on the toilet and found herself unable to go, despite the minor pressure she could feel in her bladder. After several minutes of trying to no avail, she cast a minor diagnostic spell, and the results confirmed her suspicions: there was a lasting spell upon her, one whose effects centred on her abdomen.

A _finite_ failed to undo it, and the more powerful _finite incantatem_ likewise proved ineffective. Hermione knew that there were spells that required specific counter-curses to undo; it was just her luck that Pansy had managed to find one of them. Fortunately, the effects seemed fairly trivial - though she wouldn’t want to have to endure the effects for very long - so there should, she thought, be no problem looking up the counter-curse during lunch period the next day; she had already used up her allotment of extra hours from her Time-Turner that day, so there was no way to stretch out the few minutes before bedtime into anything suitable for reading.

The plan quickly forming into a schedule in her head, she left the bathroom and got into her bed, the minor small talk her dorm-mates consistently pulled her into quickly dying away. It felt odd to sleep without emptying her bladder first - ever since she had forgotten when she was four and ended up wetting the bed, she had always been very careful in that regard - but she managed nevertheless. After all, she told herself, it wasn’t like there was any risk of the same outcome this time, now was there?

* * *

As the lunch period drew to an end, Hermione stifled a groan that would have turned into a moan as her bladder made itself known yet again. Friday’s morning had been _awful_.

Even as soon as she had awoken her bladder had been uncomfortably full, a heavy, sloshing mass pressing down in her abdomen. She had sat in the bathroom, trying to overcome the unknown spell by sheer willpower, for long enough that her roommates had become mildly concerned, knocking on the door and asking if she was alright. She suspected her concern was in part motivated by the fact that they had woken up later than her and, accordingly, had yet to relieve themselves of their own morning pee.

Charms class had quickly convinced her that someone had to be playing a joke on her, as Professor Flitwick had had them practicing the Condensation Charm. More limited than the higher years’ Water-Making Spell but much easier, it actually served as an introduction to some of the principles involved in conjuration, which Hermione would have found utterly fascinating on literally any day other than the one in which it had meant tormenting her bladder with intentionally humid air, splashing sounds whenever someone missed their cup or tipped it over, and - yes - having to drink the water she Condensed, because apparently one of the signs of an imperfectly cast Condensation was a stale taste in the produced water. Her bladder was playing havoc with her concentration, and she had failed to perfectly cast the charm _thrice_ ; it was uncharacteristic enough that Professor Flitwick had asked if something was wrong, to which she had mumbled something about a headache while she tried to ignore how every watery sound felt like an impact directly upon her bladder.

In Transfiguration they had been changing teapots into turtles, and Hermione had done her utmost to not think about the contents of those teapots, a task made no easier by the fact that several of her classmates’ poorly-performed Transfigurations produced turtles that spat out the tea, or even released it by… other means.

Merlin, how she envied those turtles.

Potions she had known in advance would be torture even if she _hadn’t_ become the butt of some cosmic prank, and she had strongly considered simply not attending; but not only would it give Professor Snape a reason to take a personal interest in her, something she strongly avoided where possible, but it would be uncharacteristic enough that some of the more personable Professors might seek her out just to see if she was okay or if she had come down with some dreadful illness.

Admittedly, she had considered talking to a Professor about her problem while she had failed to use the bathroom that morning. She eventually decided against it unless it seemed like she would be in genuine danger otherwise; not only would describing the effects of the spell ensure she could never look whomever she told in the eye again, she would also have to explain why she hadn’t reported Pansy for casting hostile and untested (if she had correctly interpreted the curiosity Pansy had shown) spells against her, and how did you tell a teacher that you didn’t trust them to actually be able to meaningfully punish a student? It would be tantamount to insulting their professionalism, and she couldn’t bring herself to even consider it.

She had regretted deciding to attend Potions when Neville, at the cauldron next to her own, somehow melted a hole through its bottom even though it was full of nothing more than warm water, which had promptly drained out and soaked everything in its vicinity, including Hermione’s feet. The contact with the water seemed to encourage her bladder, which squeezed down as tightly as it could, trying to expel its contents heedless of dignity and magic. Consciously knowing that you were magically prevented from wetting yourself was rather different from instinctively knowing it, and Hermione had, as she had been all morning, instinctively squeezed her legs together and tightened her muscles as far as she could, trying to prevent a leak that would never come.

Thankfully, lunch had followed Potions, and she had blurted some excuse that she didn’t even remember before abandoning Harry and Ron in favor of the library. She had been so hopeful when she began, skimming through books of jinxes and hexes, but after half the period had gone by without finding anything close to what Pansy had cast, that hope had begun to die.

Her next attempt was to look up a spell she recalled Professor Flitwick offhandedly mentioning once, in the rather obscure field of library-oriented magic; on her third book on the subject she struck gold. The spell was tricky and largely useless; it took a target, analyzed any spells that were on them, and searched the room they were in for any book mentioning those spells. The main factors in its uselessness were that it _only_ accepted the caster as the target and that it couldn’t search any rooms other than the one in which it was cast. It took several tries, but eventually she determined that, if the spell Pansy had cast was written down, it wasn’t in the Hogwarts Library.

By that point lunch was almost over, and another wave of desperation almost surprised her; in her excitement to learn and perform a new spell, she had actually managed to almost forget about her bladder. Almost.

Gathering her things to head to her next lesson - _Divination_ , of all things, which was intolerable even on days when it _didn’t_ mean having to torture herself with tea-leaf reading - her next step was clear to her. She would have to jump several years ahead, to begin making forays into spell analysis and cursebreaking.

Well, never let it be said that Hermione Granger shied away from an intellectual challenge.

* * *

It was slow work. She was only halfway through analyzing the spell’s function the next morning when an unwanted distraction presented itself, in the form of a gawker.

Well, perhaps she was being a little unfair. The girl who was now scanning over her notes did have reason to express interest, after all. It didn’t make it any less irritating, though, and her patience was already razor-thin, all the brainpower she would need to expend on polite conversation occupied with her work and her bladder, which she had awoken that morning to discover was visibly bulging out from her abdomen, as though she had swallowed a balloon. A balloon that felt as though it would burst at any moment, full beyond fullness with urine, heavy and sloshing and straining to empty, with her instinctively fighting it all the while.

 _Focus, Hermione. Gawker. Conversation._ She took a moment to glance at her onlooker’s face and managed to force out a “Hello, Parvati.”

“Padma,” responded the Ravenclaw twin in a tone of resigned frustration. “You’ve been sharing a dorm with my sister for over two years, how can you still not at least see the colour of my tie?”

“Right,” replied Hermione, “Pa- _ah_ -dma.” She hadn’t intended to add the extra syllable, but her bladder had spasmed in the middle of the word and she had been unable to help it. “Sorry. I was caught up in my work. Is - _ah_ \- is there something you need?”

“I wanted to see if you were really doing spell analysis. You’ve certainly got the Gryffindor bravery down - not even any of us Ravenclaws have tried that yet, it’s supposed to be tricky even for the fifth-years.” She stopped, seemed to properly look at Hermione for the first time, and with a note of concern in her voice she asked, “Are you okay, Hermione? You look like you might be coming down with something.”

“I’m fi- _ihne_ , Padma,” replied Hermione, somewhat unconvincingly. “This is just - _ah_ \- just a personal project. _Ah_ -actually, could you maybe help out by - _ohhh_ \- fetching the _Emergency Guide to Personal Wards_? It should be - _ah_ \- two shelves, um, that way, ab-about waist height?”

Padma looked dubious, but nodded, heading off to retrieve the book. It took her only a few moments to find it and return; Hermione took it with a “Th _ahhh_ nk you, Padma” and then did her best to ignore the other girl, flipping through the book until she found the section she wanted. Padma seemed to correctly interpret the dismissal and wandered away, perhaps to try and figure out what kind of personal project could involve spell analysis and warding.

It didn’t take very long to map out the minor ward scheme she wanted. The conversation had demonstrated to her how poorly she could act normal with Pansy’s spell in effect, and she wanted to avoid any other curious onlookers trying to engage her in conversation. Or, worse, a higher-year with sufficient skill seeing her work and understanding it - she was pretty sure that someone knowing of her predicament would be sufficiently embarrassing that she would burst into flames on the spot. Possibly even literally, considering the many effects accidental magic could produce.

The wards were actually quite simple, considering the potent effect they produced. A minor compulsion and a Notice-Me-Not Charm combined so that anyone who saw Hermione would pay her about as much attention as a random book on one of the shelves around her; given how normal it was for her to spend time in the library, it ought to stand up to even someone seeking her out specifically, the compulsion convincing them that they had completed their business with her and could go on to whatever they needed to do next. A particularly powerful wizard or anyone who was truly determined to find her could defeat the effect, but it was plenty for her purposes.

The technique she was going to use to power them, the book had warned, wasn’t useful for a ward that needed to last more than a few days on the outside, could only anchor wards to a person, and was considered a minor borderline-Dark spell; but for all that it was still taught because it was the most effective way to set up emergency wards when one lacked proper materials or setup time and needed them to _work_. With a wave of her wand she levitated a small ball of ink from the jar, ignoring her bladder’s protest at the thought of anything liquid; she guided it into the shape of the glyphs that would anchor the spells, then allowed it to sink into her skin, similar to a tattoo. Then came the Dark part, as a whispered spell set her skin to burning as the ink drew blood from the flesh beneath it, powering the ward with her own magic.

She glanced around to check the wards were working, and saw an older student looking in her direction in vague confusion; presumably he had been watching her work and now the compulsion was trying to smooth over the memories, to convince him that she was nothing of note. _Good. That should forestall any more conversation._

And, she noted as the most powerful urge yet had her jam her hands to her crotch in a useless attempt to hold it, now she didn’t have to conceal how badly she had to go quite so much.

* * *

Safely beneath her wards, Hermione continued to work, and a couple of hours into the afternoon she finally managed to break down the spell’s function. Honestly, she was a mixture of impressed and frustrated. It was at once amateurish and genius, clearly the production of a natural prodigy rather than someone who had come about their skills by diligent study.

The spell had three main functions and a scattering of sub-functions. The first was the one she had identified earliest - before even beginning her analysis, when she found herself unable to go while sat on the toilet. Quite simply, it blocked any liquid that entered her bladder from leaving. Obviously, that prevented the victim from urinating, but it also had the happy side-effect - since she was reasonably confident that the spell predated detailed knowledge of human anatomy - of preventing the blockage from causing urine to back up into her kidneys, which could well have caused serious damage.

The second function was responsible for the visible bulge, and the fact that she hadn’t yet ruptured anything: the spell caused the victim’s body to stretch, _almost_ enough to hold the accumulated urine, even helping to harmlessly push other organs aside when the bladder became large enough. It reinforced the bladder, too; without that effect, a sudden impact could well cause it to rupture. Whomever had designed this spell had clearly wanted to make sure it couldn’t kill its victim, merely make them very, very uncomfortable.

And the third function explained why her attempt at a workaround earlier had failed. She had thought it quite clever at the time, when partway through her analysis the idea had struck her to Vanish the contents of her bladder; but when she had cast the spell - with enormous care, because a miscast could well damage something internally - it had merely set off an enormous urge that had her curled up and moaning. According to her analysis, the Vanishment had been redirected so that it appeared back in her bladder, and a sizeable amount had been added alongside it, the sudden increase explaining the urge she had felt. It would have reacted similarly to such things as Transfiguration and, bizarrely enough, Conjuration as well; she presumed that last was a measure against the use of some variant of the Extension Charm, which she remembered reading was curiously classed as a Conjuration because of something complicated in the mechanics of how it produced the extra space.

Then there were the minor functions, which repelled other magic that would interfere with its own function - perhaps wisely, since sudden interruption could well cause significant harm - and ensured that the victim’s kidneys would operate at maximum capacity while preventing the victim from becoming dehydrated.

It was horrible, but Hermione thought she could actually understand the mindset of whomever had created the spell. It was clearly created to torment, without causing any actual harm; if knowledge of the spell and its counter-curse were limited to only a few, they could use it on anyone who annoyed or offended them and wait, secure in the knowledge that the victim would live in increasing discomfort until they managed to swallow their pride and beg for forgiveness.

Understanding didn’t mean she approved of the spell, though. She considered the idea of creating a spell just to make people uncomfortable repulsive, and - almost as bad for a bookworm like her - there were several places where even her untrained eye could see potential for improvement, where a single wand movement could be substituted for several or where those movements could be made more forgiving. Without entirely realizing it, the mind that would one day start by reinventing the Undetectable Extension Charm without several of its longest-standing limitations and only build from there set to considering an improved version of the spell.

Consciously, though, she opened a book on spell reversal and counter-curses and began planning a way to defeat the magic that still held her bladder closed. _Let’s see, obviously the first thing to go will have to be the part that stops other spells, then the anti-Vanishment measure, and the stretching will have to go last if I don’t want to tear my bladder open…_

Counter-curse creation was just as lengthy a task as spell analysis, and it seemed like barely had she even begun when already it was time for bed - and that _after_ the full six hours from her Time-Turner had elapsed. (During that time she also discovered that her wards were capable of repelling even _herself_ ; when she returned to the past she found her thoughts slipping away from the table at which her past self was sat every time she tried to think about it. _Now if that could be refined and integrated into the function of a Time-Turner, it could help avoid panic when Time-crossed selves ran into each other -_ her bladder spasmed hard, the enormous weight bearing down between her tightly-crossed legs. _Focus!_ )

Only with the aid of a Drowsiness Spell was she able to drift off into a fitful sleep that night, and her dreams were full of images of waterfalls, oceans, Hogwarts without toilets no matter how hard she looked, and peeing and peeing and peeing with the urge never decreasing by even the smallest amount.

* * *

When she awoke on Sunday morning the urge seemed to crash into her all at once, as though she had run headfirst into a brick wall. She attempted to sit up, groaned, collapsed back down, and carefully didn’t move her back as she looked down at her abdomen.

The spell had kept working overnight, and her bladder was bigger than ever; it looked as though someone had inflated her like a balloon, the swelling sticking out inches above her stomach. It felt like it was filled with stone, hard and heavy and unyielding, and all that weight seemed concentrated on the opening between her legs, which were twisted together so tightly that one wondered how they would come apart again.

It was oddly beautiful, she thought, and then caught herself and wondered just why she had thought it. A wild urge struck her, and she ran her fingers lightly over the surface of the bulge; even that lightest of contact sent waves of desperation through her entire body, the need to release her urine consuming her entire being, and ignited an odd warmth from somewhere in her abdomen - what little of it wasn’t entirely made of her bladder at this point. For a wild moment she thought the spell had broken and she had begun to wet, but pressing her hands to the area proved this false. She decided to put the matter aside for later thought.

It took some time to figure out how to stand up without paralyzing herself with need, and in the end she resorted to casting a Lightening Charm on her bladder’s contents when she realized she could do so without the spell rejecting it, a forgivable oversight in the spellmaker’s work since the Lightening Charm was several centuries newer than her analysis of the spell had implied it was. She ignored the bathroom, tried not to think about it lest it set her bladder to protest once more, and after a few moments’ thought decided against changing out of her pyjamas; her wards would prevent most people from realizing she was out of uniform, and anyone who could see through them would surely notice that she had bigger problems to deal with than her clothes.

She did expand the waistband of her pyjama trousers, though, so that it would fit around her bladder instead of sitting beneath it, because she was very nearly indecent that way; and then realized her mistake and charmed them to continue to grow to fit. She pulled on a pair of shoes and headed straight to the library, skipping breakfast as she had the previous day; she was rather too distracted to be hungry right now, and she wasn’t even going to _think_ about drinking anything, since she knew the spell wouldn’t let her become dehydrated. With every step her magically-Lightened bladder was jostled and its contents sloshed, she could almost _hear_ the watery sound, and with each step she winced and occasionally groaned, too consumed with her fullness to care even if someone _had_ been able to hear her.

* * *

It was late afternoon by the time she finally had a complete, functioning counter-curse, and only that fast because for the last few hours she had been receiving hints in the form of notes written in her handwriting and animated to land on the table in front of her, sufficiently far from the centre of her notes that she could tell that her wards were still affecting her future self.

The fact that she was receiving such help now told her that she was close to a solution, and the hope sent a thrill through her even as the prospect of relief caused her urge, impossibly, to redouble; this was the third time she had felt confident she was done, but the last two had, when subjected to diagnostics, proved respectively immediately fatal and injurious if performed imperfectly. By now she was constantly muttering incoherently under her breath, ranging from curses to pleading to wordless noises, and she was bouncing around more than a toddler on Christmas morning. When the diagnostics indicated the spell was safe in all but the most extreme of failures it took her several moments to process, leaving her staring dumbly at the tracery of words and symbols in the air before her.

When it finally sunk in, she leapt from her seat and promptly fell over, having tried to stand without untwisting her legs, and landed with her entire weight on her front; she saw stars from how badly the jolt worsened her urge. She staggered to her feet and pulled aside her pyjamas, instinct saying to check there was no visible injury despite the ludicrousness, and when she saw her bladder she gasped.

It was _enormous_. She looked like she was about to give birth; the swell of her bladder extended entirely across the width of her stomach, her sides transitioning smoothly into the bulge, and from her pelvis nearly entirely up her stomach towards her chest. It stuck out so far that she couldn’t see her feet beneath it. Only the Lightening Charm cast earlier, she suspected, even allowed her to lift it under her own power, and even with it she felt as though all the weight in the world was trying to force its way down between her legs. She felt a spasm run through her bladder and was astonished to realize she could _see it_ , a visible jolt as it tried to compress, and at some point she realized she had begun caressing the titanic bulge even as she stared at it reverently.

It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, and this time she didn’t make any attempt to suppress the thought. The warmth in her groin had become a fire, and as she shuddered and moaned involuntarily in response to her hands’ motion upon her bladder it seemed to respond, deepening and increasing in intensity.

She wasn’t sure just how long she stood there, entranced by her unbelievably full bladder, but when another student walked past with an unfocused “‘scuse me” she snapped out of her daze, flushing bright red when she realized her position. She thanked any deity that was listening that her wards were still in effect, that the students sharing the library with her presently regarded her as little more than ambulatory furniture, and then she realized that the list of wizards who would be powerful enough to see through them likely included most of the senior teachers and _definitely_ included Headmaster Dumbledore and nearly died on the spot; only the fact that she hadn’t in fact been discovered prevented her from trying to find a hole to crawl into and die.

Well, that and the fact that if she did that she would never get to empty her bladder.

That thought pulled her entirely back to reality, and she realized she needed to think about where she would go in order to, well, _go_. She hadn’t thought about what would happen once she finally had a working counter-curse, because to consider the idea of relief would have only worsened her need, but now she realized that she couldn’t just cast it where she was; ignoring the fact that the puddle ( _closer to a lake, really_ ) would be noticed and wondered about, her rule-abiding nature wouldn’t let her make a mess like that. No, she would have to use a bathroom.

Part of the reason her improvised ward scheme had worked so well was because she was a regular fixture in the library, so seeing her there was entirely expected; if someone else was in the bathroom while she went there would be no hope of hiding it, and she _really_ didn’t want anyone knowing about her situation. So she would need a bathroom that was rarely or never used, and she absolutely needed to get there without running into any teachers. Myrtle’s bathroom was out, because even if no other students would be there the ghost would, and she could quite easily start a rumor - would delight in it, in fact, for the break in the monotony. The bathrooms in and near the dorms were out, as were the ones near classrooms, and those that were on the way between any of those locations. It took a few moments for Hermione’s impressive memory to suggest a relevant location, not helped by the ever-shifting nature of the Castle Hogwarts.

Her destination in mind, she left the library and began walking, with some difficulty. Even walking jostled her bladder so much that she wouldn’t have been surprised to find it actively bouncing, each step causing such a wave of desperation that she had to stop every few paces to squeeze her legs together and hold herself, not because she would wet herself if she didn’t - _if only_ \- but because the desperation simply consumed her, overwhelming any rational thought. She had long ago abandoned the idea of trying to keep quiet, openly narrating her need to the portraits as they steadfastly didn’t notice her.

After a length of time she made no guess at, Hermione realized her path might have a fatal flaw: she had come upon a set of stairs. Slowly, hesitantly, she attempted to move onto the first step - and nearly folded in half, clutching herself, when her bladder protested. Once the urge finally retreated far enough that she could think - not far enough to be considered _gone_ , it hadn’t left her at any point in the last two days - she weighed her options, found no good solution, weighed them again, and decided on the least bad one. Resigned, and very, very carefully, she knelt down and began to crawl up the stairs.

Crawling was even slower than walking, and by the time she finally made it to the top of the flight of stairs she could barely even manage that any more. Emerging onto the wonderful, level floor, she levered herself around to protect her bladder and then collapsed, lying on the ground as impossible need and unaccountable warmth wracked her.

This was it, then. Her bladder had defeated her. She couldn’t move, she wasn’t even sure she could stand up anymore, and she certainly couldn’t make it to a bathroom. _Oh, God. I’m going to be stuck here until a Professor finds me and can undo the spell. How will anyone take me seriously after that? I won’t be able to show my face in public. Maybe if I left the country. I wonder what Australia is like._

So wrapped up in thought and desperation was she that she entirely missed the sound of approaching footsteps; even the incantation escaped her notice. When she felt herself lifting gently off the ground, though, it was enough to penetrate her fugue. She looked around herself to try and find out who had cast upon her and for what purpose, but nobody important seemed present; then another incantation came and suddenly her own voice was in her ear.

“Hi there, Hermione. Don’t worry, I’ve got you, you’re going to be fine.”

As she felt herself beginning to move through the air Hermione tried to respond to her future self, but words seemed to be beyond her; all that came out of her mouth was a deeply embarrassing _ahhhhhnnn_ sound. Nevertheless, her future self understood what she was trying to say; as well she should, since she had been the one failing to say it no more than six hours before.

“I was practicing the _mobilicorpus_ so that I was sure I would be able to carry you without jolting you. We’ll be at the bathroom in just a few moments, okay? You’ll be able to go, I promise, and then you can go back and copy the notes to give to yourself.”

Hermione moaned again, trusting that her future self would remember what she had meant.

“Yes, it works, don’t worry. We’re nearly there, just a few more minutes now…” She kept up a constant stream of encouraging noises as she carried Hermione towards the bathroom, a thought which was both wonderful and torturous to the desperate girl. She would finally, _finally_ get to relieve herself - but not _yet_ , for _now_ she still had to hold it, and for the life of her she didn’t know how she could - and a little part of her dreaded the event, because if she emptied her bladder would she lose the warmth she felt? She would definitely lose the bulge where her overfull bladder strained against her skin, and that thought was bizarrely dismaying…

And then, finally and yet all too soon, they came to a stop. Hermione looked around and saw that, yes, there was the bathroom she had been aiming for. And suddenly, unexpectedly, she felt herself being tipped upright, and whimpered as her bladder protested the change.

“Sorry!” came her voice in her ear. “Look, we’re here. You’re almost there, you’re so close - you just have to walk inside, sit down, and cast the counter-curse, and then you can finally, _finally_ go, okay? I can’t come in with you because, um, I? didn’t the first time - stupid time travel - and anyway I think you’ll want it to be private, but trust me, it will work, you’ll be able to go, and on the off-chance you somehow need me just shout, I’ll be right here. I’m going to weaken the _mobilicorpus_ now, you’ll be able to walk, get ready…”

The spell did indeed weaken, and she dropped the inch or so to the floor, sending a jolt through her bladder more appropriate for a fall from a cliff. Barely able to coordinate her movements she somehow managed to walk forward, through the door that opened in front of her, and towards the nearest toilet; then, changing her mind, she went to the furthest one instead.

She pulled down her trousers and sat, then looked down at her stomach - she wasn’t sure if she was imagining things or if it really was visibly bigger than the last time. She pulled her wand from her shirt pocket where she had put it in the library what felt like an eternity ago, and brought her hand into position to begin the counter-curse.

And waited, indecisive, trying to work up the effort to release the accumulated urine of - God, with her Time-Turner it had been somewhere around _three days_ since she had been hit by that curse, and the last time she had gone before that had been when she woke up that day.

And she waited.

Her bladder spasmed again, like so many times before, but this time it seemed _insistent_ , with release so close now - but that was ridiculous, she was just projecting her own conscious desires onto her oh-so-full bladder -

And still she waited.

A wild, ridiculous urge struck her, and she placed the hand not holding her wand gently on her bladder, feeling it protest the contact, and rubbed against it gently, soothingly - and then suddenly pressed down, _hard_ , right over her navel, and in the pain and pleasure that erupted from the act she nigh-on _screamed_ , and half-expected her future self to think that she was in trouble and come dashing in, but no, of course not; she would remember doing the very same, after all.

And with her hand still pressing down on her bladder she waited. But the thought of her future self reminded her that the girl - time travel made pronouns so _complicated_ \- had already gone through this, so she knew how it turned out, and she had been coherent, so clearly she wasn’t still holding on; and besides, she wouldn’t help herself to the bathroom if in doing so she had lost the pleasure she felt, right? No, she wouldn’t, she knew because _she_ \- the present her - wouldn’t. So because she had brought herself here, she knew it would work out well.

Yes. That made sense.

Though that didn’t stop her from waiting just a few more minutes, just in case.

But eventually she was ready. She took away the hand that had been applying pressure and bit off a moan at the relief even that small act gave. And then she began the incantation to her first-ever created spell.

Admittedly, the spell itself was amateurish and clunky. That was expected and normal, the book said; almost nobody could produce an elegant spell on their first try, and those that did were almost always producing the most simple of effects - a minor push, or a weak light, or any of a thousand other tiny results. And she was not only two years younger than the students the book was aimed at but distracted by her bladder the whole time; it was entirely justifiable that her spell’s incantation was a thirty-nine-syllable, barely coherent sentence rather than a single word or a scant few, and that its wand movement took almost thirty seconds - especially since she had prioritized making it error-tolerant, because she knew her precision would be shot - and indeed that the motion involved meant it could _only_ target the caster, not anyone else. Consciously, she knew that with circumstances as they were the spell would still achieve an Exceeds Expectations at worst from any fair Professor, but that didn’t stop a small part of her brain from objecting, claiming that she should have made it simple and elegant and perfect. She shoved that part aside.

The first time she attempted to cast it, a wave of urgency that somehow managed to catch her by surprise interrupted her incantation. She began again, and this time very nearly dropped her wand - and good thing she managed to catch it, because with her bladder in the state it was in she would never have been able to get it back. The third time she jumped the gun, releasing the magic before she was even halfway into the spell; a wave of raw force burst from the tip of her wand, which she put aside as something to look into later.

She took a moment to remind herself that her future self had _clearly_ managed to cast the spell from the simple fact that she had been able to stand up, and took a deep breath, releasing it immediately when even that seemed to put intolerable pressure on her bladder.

The fourth time was the charm, so to speak. She spoke the mangled incantation clearly despite the moans that tried to force their way forth, moved her wand correctly through waves of urgency and heat that pulsed through her, and released the spell; a ripple similar to the one Pansy’s initial spell produced struck her enormous, distended bladder, and she felt the peculiar sensation of her _magic_ twisting, and then -

And _then -_

Sheer bliss.

The very moment the magical hold on her bladder’s neck released it seemed as though the jet of urine sprang into being fully-formed without actually crossing the intervening space; and half a second later the relief hit Hermione like a physical force. So intense was the sensation that she was unable to even vocalize it, which was good, because she would certainly have been screaming. On and on drained her bladder, and when she thought to look she realized she could _see_ it slowly deflating; and as her relief grew and her _need_ ebbed the fire in her groin burned hotter and hotter until all at once she felt she was burning up, but if that was fire she never again wanted to feel water; her entire being seemed at once to be transformed to pleasure defying description, and some corner of her mind that somehow remained capable of thought dryly pointed out that she had certainly underestimated things when she wondered if her future self would have brought her there to _lose_ the feeling.

She made no guess as to just how long she remained there, floating on a haze of sensation and utterly divorced from the outside world; but eventually she did slowly come back down to earth, and when she did she found her bladder had finished emptying some time ago, and also that her entire body seemed to have been replaced by solid lead because she couldn’t figure out how to move _anything_.

After a few minutes more her future self knocked on the door and called out. “Are you almost done in there, Hermione? Because you need to go back to the library and Turn back pretty soon if you’re going to have enough time to do everything you need to do. Remember, you have an entire new spell to learn!”

And at the last sentence Hermione _did_ perk up, because the lure of new learning was enough to rouse her even from her blissful stupor. Yes. She would go back, and give herself the notes, and learn the spell, and bring herself here to do _this_ -

And if after that she should start working on those improvements she had thought of for the spell that started off the entire situation, and if she might, perhaps, start to use it on occasion - or maybe very _frequent_ occasion - even if not _quite_ as long as she had taken this time, well... That wouldn’t be anybody’s business but her own, now would it?


End file.
